As I’ve mentioned in some of my other posts on using the UrbanCode Designer to design HOT documents, one of the key benefits is the significant productivity gain in not having to hand code a lot of the “tedious” Heat constructs, not having to remember resource names when hooking them up together, not worrying about YAML indentation and validation. Every new version adds more of these features which you can find in the Knowledge Centre or on Youtube (search for UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns” ).
One of the other major benefits that UrbanCode Designer is the idea of “cloud portability” : the ability to design blueprints that are “cloud agnostic”.

Different strokes for different folks. When it comes to full-stack environment provisioning every customer has their own opinions and cobbled together set of tools: homegrown scripts to Chef and everything in between (and on either side). Working with UrbanCode customers over the past year there was a sort of trend where they want “everything” on the stack – from infrastructure up through application and configuration – sometimes including the operating system, to be done in/from one place. This is particularly true where they don’t already have investments in say Chef or don’t want to take on yet another technology/tool/solution/language. What they might have is a bunch of existing automation in the form of scripts or knowledge in the heads of their development/operations folks. Or in reams of documentation that must be worked through carefully to get an environment up

From one of my favourite plays, rendered in somewhat recent times in superb fashion IMHO, by one of my favourite directors (a fellow Aussie and New South Welshman by the way:-).

The naming gods must have finally read “Connecting UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns to OpenStack” and decided the UrbanCode Deploy with Paterns (UCDP/UCDwP/UCD+P..) name is indeed a mouthful. Mouthful or not, Eric Minick provides a bit more detail on UCDwP becoming part of UrbanCode Deploy with the 6.1.2 version in his post . Problem solved indeed and does make perfect sense as I’ve been finding when showing UCDwP to customers moving into the cloud over the past year or so. For simplicity I’m just going to call the cloud blueprint capability the “Designer”.

A recent post from Doug Davis “Docker: Managing the excitement” has some nice insights on Docker as a “relatively new” technology. Among the other Docker niceties that Doug points out, one that resonated with me is, and I quote “it takes seconds (if not less than a second, after the first time since things are cached) for it to complete”. Reading between the lines in some of my other posts, I’ve often battled the dark forces of virtual machine world, usually trying to squeeze every bit of extra juice out of my poor laptop. Then I tried Docker and well, suffice to say I need fewer coffee breaks.

My long-time colleague and friend Takehiko Amano has a post on “Immutable Infrastructure” where he talks about Docker in the context of OpenStack and with a bunch of my earlier posts focused on OpenStack, I decided to figure out how the three – OpenStack, Docker, and UCD+P might work together.